


First you must live it

by lifewithoutcosette



Series: First you must live it [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-25
Updated: 2018-10-25
Packaged: 2019-08-07 12:38:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 18
Words: 6,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16408655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lifewithoutcosette/pseuds/lifewithoutcosette
Summary: In 2016 I made it a goal to write either a small piece of fanfiction or a random story every single day.  I gave myself 2 to 3 hours to write and edit every day.  These are either warm ups for bigger works or, if I felt like not writing fanfiction, these became my focus for the evening.  They are all free writes that have been edited - while I did post the unedited versions to my tumblr at the time, AO3 felt like a place where they should be more polished.  Unfortunately in the Spring of 2017 my life went a bit tits up, and I haven't been able to jump back into the swing of things....so these are sort of a scrapbook in words if you will.Fair warning; there are dark themes written about, and there is some NSFW content.But let's be real, we're here for a good time - not a long time, right? ;)





	1. Dislocation

It is dark.

Leaves twist in the breeze differently at night. When it’s 2 a.m. and the whole world would be stygian wilderness except man invented electricity. You’d be sat on the dirt outside a crumbling grass shack next to a massive river under tall trees, boughs heavy under the weight of greenery that only marked its place in the blocking out of starlight.

_But._

We made electricity.

We made concrete and rebar and glass, and we cut down the trees along the river long before that mighty force of nature could sweep them from her banks in a swollen rage, borders spilling over from torrential downpours and runoff. We have interceded and created civilization, bending nature to our will. 

Sitting there you think _how funny is this world, where I’m five hours ahead of my country, my city…this breathing heaving beastly closely-regulated civilization because man invented the great mechanical dragon called the airplane, with its shifting fiberglass cabin and its stale recirculated air. Moving humans from one place to the next._

Moved the clock forward five hours in your brain, and you’re expecting coffee and twittering birds and the shock of a wet humid blanket smothering cool skin, choking your pores and rendering a shower completely pointless. But no, here, _home_ , in this city it is night and cool - blessed reprieve from harsh sunlight, except down below on the pavement you can see the young foliage waving in a small breeze. The matte bellies of the leaves are palest green and they wink up at you in the midst of the more playful gusts.

And there walking under them? Young lovers wandering home from the city to bed. Whose bed is anyone’s guess. Dark nights under green leaves lit by far away arc sodium lights bring out the adventurous spirit in young people. They neck greedily, touch openly and long, before moving on down the lane. What a difference five hours makes when it’s your own city you’re out of rhythm with.

But maybe you’re not.

Maybe this is the hour you have always been intended to see. Who else with so much experience in life and darkness and pure kind light could love 2 a.m.? The yawn sneaks up on you. Didn’t take long this time. Cool sheets and a warm lover wait for you and you want to go.

Another draft of cool air kicks up and the trees shoo you off to bed. Tuck your feet up carefully. And there’s the embrace - the warm circle at your waist, the lips at your shoulder. “Dreamed you’d not come home yet, saw you in hot bright light.” And you smile and weave your fingers through his. “I'm here, just getting my hours back.” A kiss on his palm, a gentle squeeze as he falls back to sleep. “Missed you.” Soft like the wind on your skin. You smile into the inky air, one that could never be in the harsh light of day five hours ahead; the smile of completeness.

It is dark.

For a few more hours.


	2. Absolution

Wasteful and shameful  
The western world left the rest of the world in a restless void  
With stargazers and miscreants   
And the time for that is over - stop debating the infinite and just live in tomorrow  
Like good star travelers do  
Tomorrow and the end of yesterday are all we get  
And tomorrow’s never promised  
Just a leash to keep a harbor slot and absolve the narrative of the evening.


	3. High E

It’s the smallest noise in the universe. The littlest things give him away, always. The little mouse in their shared house. Oh the mess of this man that he loves forever attached and clingy and a wreck sometimes. Everyone’s a wreck sometimes. Even he is…but that’s what his little Irish Mouse is for, to kiss away the rev and burn of the fast lane of the day, to pull him over to the shoulder **_‘switch on your hazards and just…breathe.’_**

Little tiny thing all cooped up in this house today. Can’t be seen out, no new places to go but can’t haunt the old ones, not with this new thing he’s been doing lately. And so when he enters the flat and hears the little creak of the small feet and the hushed breath he is pleased and perplexed and sad and covetous…because there is some other foreign noise there too. _Something_. It pops and burns in memory. A muted twang on the air. He rounds the corner ‘brought your guitar out of storage, hope you don’t mind. i haven’t a clue to do with it but…’ strumming sour jangly notes ‘it reminded me of you.’ In his holey jeans and tight wrinkled v neck, hair a mess, eyes dancing and glassy - too much dead sunlight today - dull half diffused light filtered through panes of glass and vinyl blinds and sheer curtain sets and he’s just there rocking softly on the floor with this wooden antiquity perched on his lap.

Smiling now ‘you mean i might actually teach you something for once?’ He grins and shrugs, chews at an unoccupied fingernail, plucking slightly at the high E string. The ring of their lives, a tiny hopeful thing just trying to survive in the madness of dust flying around the room.

‘maybe.’


	4. Need

When you’re sad I want to stitch your mouth closed and watch the tears spill down your cheeks. Your happy smile is covered by a hand anyway why not stitch it on so I can pull it close - a tug on red string.

I want your hands on my skin tracing all the curves, making me shiver with light empty touches. I want your fingernails sunk into my back, the feel of your palm cupping my ass right before you draw my leg up around your waist, the slim length of your body pressed tight against me, our chests moving apart, drawing together with each rushed breath.

I want to feel the oddly irritating pain of sharp buttons as they squirm out from under my fumbling fingers. It’s too difficult to join my senses long enough to perform simple tasks like undressing you when your eyes are hunting my every move _(not yet)_.

I just need the hot skin of your belly under my palms and threadbare cotton separates when stubborn plastic clings to fabric. Need to drag my nails down the smooth skin there, tuck my hands into your jeans and pull you e.v.e.n.c.l.o.s.e.r

When I can’t stand the muffled moans and my tongue aches for yours I will slit the thread binding your lips together. Devour me with that mouth. I can’t hold out any longer.

~~_(all my playthings are ragdolls)_ ~~


	5. Lazy Saturday

Tomorrow is coming and tomorrow means thinking and feeling and needing and there's entirely too much of that going on lately. Why can't there be days where it's enough to lay on the couch and clutch a pillow to your chest - contemplate the movement of dust through variegated beams of sunlight - chancy hues picked up through sheer colored fabric waving in the summer / autumn in between breeze, drifting in through barely parted panes.

Dancing motes swirling across the space as the afternoon wears on - inches from your face now. Imagine them bumping into your lazy skin, racing in untold numbers through your nostrils into your lungs, bouncing round the alveoli there before being roughly expelled back into the room.

What must it be like to be dust?

Each minute you sit here wondering brings you closer to the realization. What must it be like to be dust? We must all know, in the end.

And twitch if you might, I see that smile on your lips. It's a sickly grin that has you shying away back into the shadows.  
Better to wait in the dark than watch yourself breathe in your decaying neighbor.


	6. When you drink

When you drink the liquid in the heavens it fills you up and there’s no more room for crying, no more tears the color of skies with clouds in them, no more blood in your mouth from the constant beating of skin and bone against the small strict structures that grind meat and fruit flesh, flies for days in the twitch of your eye for thinking there might be a reprieve.

When you drink the liquid of the flesh in its reddest form there is no going back and some people think that makes you a monster, some people think you’re evil for aching in the jaw to bite bite bite down on flesh and scar tissue and muscle, to tenderly rend it to pieces between the polished stone pebbles in your mouth and bathe your tastebuds in melted pennies and the pained but excited jag that ripples through the muscles caught between your lips makes you want a tongue between your legs, a hand squeezing your neck, a gun in your ribs; nothing could kill you anyway not the places you’ve been or the people you’ve seen fucking in the corners the dark places on the road between satisfaction and hunger.

When you drink the liquor liquid it just makes you want a long slow fuck up against your neighbor’s wall to feel every rough touch in your soul and to cry out in deep tones for mercy please oh god fuck me hard and fast a whisper your soul to mine mine to yours don’t I can’t stand it if you do I need this slow motion desperate dance with you. I’ll never feel you like this again with your day old stubble and your hair tickling my shoulder your face buried in my neck. i can feel my skin pregnant with condensation from your constant heated exhalations, your murmured moans into the curve of my collarbone; my name the name of our gods your name, finally nothing - a nameless tuneless mindless oh against my skin leaving it dripping wet, -as above so below, yea god- and I can feel you sliding in rivers down my thighs, a dam burst forth to meet the stone wall of my anatomy. I can’t contain it and should have drunk it now instead there’s this wasted tributary of humanity staining my carpet white with the might once have been future of nations.

That is all liquor for you, fills your belly so you have no room for seed, your head with sand so you haven’t the sense to swallow instead of spreading your legs.

When you drink the starlight I want to murder you in your sweet untroubled sleep, but then the instrument I choose would be my mouth and it is otherwise engaged. When it has done its work you are smiling down at me and I would again savage continents of people in any striated form to have you again.

When you drink from me all I hear is the constant wind across a lake, the sweet slap lap of the fresh water against the wooden pier wet with ages of anticipation. When you double me over and I make my hands at home in the forest of your hair and cry out for more I am begging you and shaking and needing… you apply not liberal strokes but gentle nibbles and I must whimper for longer and wait.

When I think of all that we have drunk from life in cities and mountains in dead civilizations and those too young to know they are so, when I see all the color of the world in the sick you leave on the bathroom floor, I know we’ve lived.  
I want to drink more.


	7. Letter to a broken lover

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> {here we are, the three of us, in vapor and shadow dancing across the lush green face of the world, you and me .... and time}

My little thing (tiny creature) I can't see who you used to be anymore some days. You're more than that strapped youth in grown up clothing yearning to have the pyramids under the ball of his foot.

You've left that man behind in spectacular splattered fashion. How your head must have bounced off the springy shingles and spread your blood far and wide in the impact.

The gummed up ruined hair, the sharp skull (it would have torn anyone's fingers to bits had they dared to poke at it); your life in a few pints of blood.

Was it goodbye then that I saw in your eyes as you propped your chin on my chest? Was I wrong to see nothing then but the calm I'd been missing for so long? Oh how I welcomed it. How I long for that moment and that moment and that moment only at times...to see your love for me in the calm sea of those eyes.

A final happy gift you thought (I believe it so).

Oh if you knew the tiny happinesses in my days now. How would you mark them? Doubtless with disdain and disgust, you'd never deign to speak to yourself as you are now, little bright collapsed star in my bed.

Fingers gripping mine, so soft at first and then with greater strength. Your eyes are always that calm sea now, apart from seeing all the world new and fresh like the child you never got to be. How those hazel discs stutter gently as they chase the birds from horizon to horizon. You'd cross lakes, oceans even, to proffer their daily morsel. They take it, greedy and graceless and pinch your fingers, a simple gesture begging for more (and more and more).

Your arms raise to be them, but they are so small and held so wrongly. DaVinci couldn't make you fly as you are now, my little wing, my tiny flaming star - cold hot; nighttime welded to sunlight.

How slowly you gaze, for hours, at shades pluck'd from the sun and sky by crystal clear glass. They paint you in jealousy, anger...enrich your cheeks with love and sadness...even the color of one most ill plays over your skin yet you smile and coo at these shades that sometimes blind you brilliantly, depending on how the earth shifts.

And when it's night and dark you are pink and shivering, made new with cleanliness and marveling; how small the round toes of your feet. How delicate they are now. Treading through the streets of London or France or Belfast on business left a mark once, the gait and shape of important work, but that's all gone - just lovely rose pink petal smooth skin on white sheets with hardly a wrinkle on which to base a stride.

Looking down at you now sleeping, I am longing for you as you were: A lord - fearsome and strong and only needy for weakness of others. My Jim. My Dark King.

I only write to get these thoughts down. Allusion is all it is, to days both better and, truly, far far worse. The illusion of our love in the past.

Your eyes can't understand these shapes anymore. Your mouth can't sound around the lines to hear them. A dead language on paper. But you still say my name. And I still turn and run when it's called.

No matter how fiercely you wished to exit you're stuck now being my Jim.

My heart couldn't let you go a second time.


	8. Four Seasons

He loves you in winter when the cold snow swirls in frozen tornadoes in the streets, wraps your jacket around you and kisses your fingers, your palms, before slipping your gloves over them to keep them safe from frigid temperatures in deep snow under iron skies.

In winter when you’re a vision in pink cheeks and bright eyes, static makes your hair fly away in every direction and he promises to see you tonight and kisses you goodbye. His lips are soft on yours and when he draws away you lean forward to catch them again. It’s a gentle fall and he catches you in his arms, pulls you close. Goodbye turns into whispered _stay_ , muffled and desperate, the press of need into your lips, hands curled at the small of your back.

Soon your carefully buttoned jacket is a mess on the floor.

You keep your gloves on though. You like the feeling of four strange hands on your otherwise naked skin.

He loves you in spring when there is green on the ground and the newly born light dances over your shape in his bed. His sleep heavy eyes and warm hands meet to brush the hair from your face. He ducks below cream sheets and before long your whimpers are competing for airtime with the twittering birds outside the open window.

Spring makes your thighs loose and your fingers curl in his hair. Warm and new and fresh. Milk and honeyed tongue on your skin bathing it with cool saliva and flattering words, compliments in little susurrations against your stomach, affirmations panted hotly against your neck. The nothing of stares and happy eyes - pools of possibility in the newness that is spring.

Summer keeps you occupied with dazzling stars couched in inky velvet, countless but you try. You stop at seventy five because you realize he’s not counting things that hang in the dark, he’s making a study of your freckles and your eyelashes, toting up the half moons in your fingernails. He ducks under the frame of your hair and swipes his fingers over your parted lips…so very gentle.

“Two” he says, licks his own lips and nuzzles his nose in your cheek “one,” it’s a whisper as he joins you together under the stars.

He loves you when the night is dark and warm and the universe is expanding in your eyes. He makes the stars reachable on a blanket with clever touches and a well placed mouth and you think _what have I done to keep him? Why is this mine?_ before your throat opens and stutters out a new galaxy.

You take his hand in autumn, cool and dry, his lightening skin the color of bruises and you think… _I have loved beyond my reason._

He thinks

_I could never love enough._

You say goodbye before gold turns to copper, before red loses its vibrant glow of half life and deepens to brown. The skinny arms reaching up to heaven in autumn are you.

Forever wanting seasons.

Always begging him to stay.


	9. Bath

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A thing I wrote for a friend

_Earth under your fingernails. The smirk of contrasting curves. She washes your hands "don't you know it's perfectly alarming the regularity with which you come home dirty? Can't you leave off digging for a while?" The water swirls down the drain and takes some of your dying skin with it._

Years later there is never a speck of dirt to be found on you working in the cafe.

He comes in every day sweating with his long wavy hair swept off his face, secured at the nape of his tanned neck in a loose black band. His shoes are worn and dirty, skin gleaming from so many days under the sun, arms long and muscular. His blue eyes are tired. He asks for water.

In your dreams you draw him a bath.

In your dreams your fingers work loose the nylon band, unbutton the sun bleached shirt, work the belt from its loops and metal catches. Your hands strip away your robe. Your back rests against warm porcelain, his scarred skin settles into the water between your legs. The back of his head dips below the surface between your chin, your shoulder. He sighs. Your fingers work through the tangled mass of light strands, lather frothing silkily on the water's surface, clinging to your skin as it sails past.

In your dreams you make him clean.

When he is toweled dry, a man in matte finish, he takes you - wet and trembling with cold - and lays you down on the plush dark carpet, tongues the water from your lips, wipes his palms through the moisture on your thighs and parts them like the sea.

In your dreams he leaves you wet and breathless and spilling over.

In the cafe, he asks for water.

In the cafe where you're clean and wish for dirt.


	10. Sand

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If you smile at the ocean in the last dying light before she swallows you, do you think she gets the joke and waves?

Precious.

You never know how few things that word actually applies to until you lose one that qualifies.

My hand used to hold yours when we strolled by the sea, the air heavy with promise, no one else’s voices could carry over the crashing of the waves. Just mouths moving stupidly in the distance.

Silence except for elements in space rolling over one another - sodium and oxygen and hydrogen collapsing, mixing…frothing at our feet. Your toes, browned on top from the sun, sink lightly into the wetly packed rubble disbursing the salt water clinging to them there… and I think _my god this is it. I’m at the end of a continent with you._ It's not quite right but it feels right. What could ever be more important in all the world but our clothes rippling away from us in the constant breeze, our words being whipped from our smiling mouths….waves rushing over your feet, leaving small deposits behind, your skin losing all definition in sand drifts.

It struck me oddly then and I never got it out of my mind, the way you seemed to sink. I couldn’t place why it bothered me. Your smile chased out the thought and we stood still staring at the horizon …crash after wreck after accident rolling up the beach before us.

I buried you in your sandals. You wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

_Accident. Wreck. Crash._

I saw your feet sinking in the sand and thought…. _that shouldn’t happen. He should be protected from sinking, from being buried._ _From dunes brimming over his toes, erasing him by millimeters._

And yet.

Here we are and you’ve been erased with ordinary earth, not even the angry waves to beat you against microscopic rock. Pulverized bones of the earth for man to walk on, naked and glimmering in the sun.

Not for you.

Only the blackest soil to cover you.

Funny how we displace so many things in life, most finally dirt.

I contemplate these things as daylight turns rosy on my cheeks. The tide rushes around me. Sediment weighs me down from nails to knees and I think

 

_I_ _’ll drown before I’m properly buried._

 


	11. Rainbow / Void

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> who i love versus who i married

Swiftly moved like collapsible furniture. My feelings. One moment just a cotton candy purple blue pink lightness of being. The next they’re grey and heavy, melting with sadness underfoot.

It’s one person for each set. One set of persons for each color scheme.

There’s only ever one person for neon yellow orange umber amber twilight hues and fantasy blue fading skies. He’s the richest colors. Green veins in sun gathering leaves, prisms refracted through early morning dew hanging from the flesh of a lilly.  
He makes blood searing red and arousal pretty pink. Clouds pick up his mood. Even white varies in hue.

Blueberries stain my dress plummy purple, paint my cheeks with humor in the warm light of summer evenings.

Have you seen a rainbow?

It’s that…but he also tells blue jokes and tickles and touches and tastes until you can see the flashing white edge of space behind your eyelids.

He’d never let you fly out into the black; reels you in with the clever anchor of his skin, his voice.

He’s my sunrise. The reason I slog through the mire of long night hours. The reason I can reason.

My fingers are bathed in compartmentalized rays of starkly different tones and I can think of no one else responsible.

He is peace.

The other, he is the infirmity clawing away at my eyes. He strives for order and darkness and shriveled dead vines on black pavement. He would have dry seas and dead fish, bare nests of starving child birds as entertainment. Watch them die slowly. Suffocation. Starvation.

He wants me on my back without purpose except to paint the world in nightshade.

He is the void.

There is only one person for hurricanes and lightning, one person for the endless timeless soul wrenching trudge across the no color desert under a sky that presses down until it flattens you…mangles you to bits and bobs of who you thought you were - who you used to be. Mines you for complicity in your own destruction. 

I’m wearing a blindfold to fool him. I may be covered in the grey dust that he so revels in creating, but I still dream in color.


	12. Fever

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wrote this in fever twilight. Fevers can get bent.

"Cold." He grabs at the edge of the blanket, groping around in that half asleep half fog reality that is a fever dream. His breath wheezes in and out of his chest like a pile of broken sticks. 

A soft warm hand unfolds the blanket over his chest. "There you are." 

Floaty. 

Like that voice came from some underwater city...and now he's drifting through Atlantis, a great bubble of air around his head. Light from oval domicile windows wavers in the street. Street is the wrong word. On land, where gravity is king, streets are flattened into a single surface. These lanes of transportation here are fluid; in every sense. 

Fascinating.


	13. Coffin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> haunted

Hold my   
hand  
Tell me   
everything   
Will be  
................

She slammed the slender cloth bound book down on the circular table, shoved it roughly into the sun before backing away.  
“Will you still love me?” He whispered. No. It’s a trick. Nobody will still love him because he’s dead. You can’t love the dead - they are dust.

It floated all around her in the room, settled like thickly falling snow on the cherry wood. Mocking her. She couldn’t be rid of him even now when he’d been dead for years. He lurked in every book, every song. He read every line of copy for sinister cinematic features. ‘In a world,’ and so on. She can’t breathe without him swirling into her lungs.

Her eyes closed tightly. Picturing him moldering away in his box beneath what seemed like acres of silk hung from polished one use steel and plastic.

Extravagant. 

Wasteful. 

How her fingers thrilled at the touch of the cold chrome-plated latches on the front.

Locked in his box, sealed in his vault, pressed down by the inestimable weight of dirt. He wasn’t coming for her, but she still heard his step in the hall, the whisper of his hat on the rack. Sometimes even felt his cold feet under hers in bed.

She wound a scarf round her neck, purple and knit, and opened the door.

The shadow of this house wouldn’t follow her any longer. She extended the handle on her suitcase and it rolled behind her out into the street.

Why bother with the latch, she thought, when everything left in that place belongs to a dead man?  
A smile curled on her lips, her feet lead her around the corner and out of sight of that hateful flat forever.


	14. Beyond the great surrender

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This was a bridge piece for ... a thing I wrote a very long time ago. It's a standalone so I'll put it in. I love the idea of it so very much.

It’s just an ordinary day full of ordinary clouds. The only extraordinary thing about it is the newly tuned piano waiting in the empty room. It feels like the whole house is waiting for him to settle quietly on the bench and open the lid. He’d never quite got around to oiling the hinge, but then he supposed that shrill little squeak was just as much a part of this old piano as he was of this house. Familiar. Creaky.

 _Crikey_ he thinks with a smile. Silly word, that. If he’s letting his mind wander like that he’s in the perfect state to tool around on this old beauty for a bit. His fingers hover over the keys and just before he brings them down the somber anchoring rumble of thunder shakes through the house. Looking out the window, at the now dark clouds rolling past through the sudden splat of rain on glass, at the birds circling wildly in the sky looking for shelter, he is quite overwhelmed by a sort of sad premonition.

His brow creased, his eyes focused on the now bright and frequent lightning playing across the horizon, he lets his fingers fall where they may on the keys. Black, white, both… Slowly a storm of notes grows in their sitting room. Glissandos for leaves flying back and forth across his vision, a sustained muddled rumble at the lower end for the thunder punctuated by bright staccato notes for lightning. It’s grandiose and simple all at once. Instead of a great Heller piece he is simply playing the heaviness of weather. The sky eggs him on. He feels as though he could continue forever.

As the light fades farther under the ominous clouds and time passes on he thinks… _what might darkness sound like?_ A drop of blood, bright red, crashes onto middle C and he grinds it between the keys with a quick ill-timed glissando. That brings the storm of notes to a sudden halt, the fog of the unfinished melody dissolving into the carpet.

He stares at the streak which diminishes as it continues up the scale…from dark thick bright red to a light almost frothy pinkish smudge at the far end. His hands go cold and he is shocked to look down and see an already rusty looking crescent of blood…gummy and impossible to swipe away from under his nail. A second drop falls and then …

Cracked in two, this moment.

There was _before_ \- when he was playing light and leaves, when he was swirling the wind and rain around through chords.

Now the _after_ – all this red streaming out of him.

His head crashes to the carpet, but it feels pillowed. Fuzzy and drifting. His vision narrows to next to nothing and then winks out altogether. Jim lies there as the storm rages on around their house. A dreadful silence falls over the sitting room with its branded piano.

That dark red streak would never come out of the keys. Not even after the heart which pumped it round miles of veins had forever stilled.


	15. Glass

A careworn looking glass jar pitted and chewed up in a half circle spiral after a dance with the pavement. It’s a wonder it didn’t break. That’s one of those moments in life you can never expand on, everything else stops. Surely the truck must have kept driving, the marbles probably made a dull slap bounce in ever varying time…like hail.

You must have made an “oh” of surprise … but who remembers any of that? What are those small things compared to the narrowing of time when you first noticed the jar tip too far at your feet? What else could matter except the wavy roundness of the green glass shot through with small bubbles striking yellow metal and beginning to roll. You’re helpless to stop anything when everything is rolling at forty miles an hour.

She goes fast like a shot, the sound of a drumroll on the air. Green glass spilling forth the first few marbles from a shining rim as it’s shot out into the void. Crisp pale blue winter horizon clashes with her native hue; glittering. A last ditch plea to be hauled back aboard before she disappears from sight. Your fist pounds relentlessly on the roof of the tuck's cab, skin and muscle earning a purple yellow green brown bruise a few days later. If there is the sound of smash and shatter it’s lost in your shrill cry for a halt.

The scramble begins while you’re still moving through space. A vault off the tailgate like it’s a springboard and you’re sprinting toward a shard of light so many yards ahead/behind. Nothing widens out again until you see the static round glass on the broken dividing line. The shock of air and noise as traffic passes the opposite direction has your senses on alert for more (more danger more noise more birds wheeling in the sky with eyes for pretty shinies scattered at your feet), has your back braced for death.

Hello.

I’m indestructible.

I’m a jar.

And I can stop time.

It’s funny the things that stop time. The things you remember when your time is nearly over. Your scarred and pitted jar full of scarred and pitted marbles is locked in your pretty perfect coffin with your bent and twisted bones and your lose and shifting skin.

It finally breaks, finally melts into your hair your teeth your marrow in the crematorium fire.

Now you are caught in a flat jar

in a flat grave

on a flat table

in a round world


	16. These are my hands

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> NSFW A free write exploring my sexuality

I would ask you to close your eyes. “Think of him,” I’d say. “These are his lips,” a kiss on your neck. “His tongue,” it darts out and traces your collar bone, sets you to shivering.

“These are his hands,” my fingers untuck your shirt, slide lightly over your skin, dance across the small of your back before tracing the gentle sloping curve of you up and over the delicate bones of your ribcage.

I don’t speak anymore, my eyes take in your flushed cheeks, your glorious flyaway hair. Freckles dotted across the bridge of your nose and the way your eyelashes curve up from your cheek. _Beautiful_. Your pink lips, wet from a nervous tongue. They are all I want. All I need to taste. But not yet.

My hands are still playing over your smooth skin, warm and covered in goosebumps. Your breath hitches in what I hope is excitement or a curious longing as my hands pull you close, my lips settle on your neck. Your pulse thrills me. It’s wild and dangerous feeling.

My fingers find their way under the cruel underwire and slip your breasts free, thumbs teasing your nipples erect. You suck your lip between your teeth and swallow hard. My lips against your ear. I whisper “is this okay?” And you nod. My heartbeat picks up.

Hope.

Fear.

Lust.

Oh yes, lust.

You moan and arch your back just a bit as my tongue settles hot and wet beside your nipple. At first I lap against it, over it, around it. And when I can no longer hold out my lips close around it and suck gently, teeth graze it just slightly. Your hand is in my hair and you’re nearly purring.

Are you still thinking of him? Do you think of him even as I unsnap your jeans, even as my fingers trace the elastic of your underwear around the curve of your leg down down down….and over to rub against you there…a phantom touch through cotton. Are you thinking of him still? Is that why, when my fingers divide you to find that most sensitive spot they come away slick, is that why you moan and gasp and buck against my hand when I rub lightly, gently…the way I know makes my own knees weak.

Are you still thinking of him?

I look up to check and see you watching me. I straighten up and search your eyes. I find acceptance, I find longing. I find myself. I lean in and touch our lips together, feel your tongue dart between mine and suddenly we are only thinking of each other.

 


	17. Dream

Don’t despair I said, but your tears fell anyway. Some sort of magic in the silence of tears; quiet indicators of internal earthquakes. My hands found your face, thumbs spreading the turbulent drops to dry on your skin. You can be sad, but not about this. You’re crying over lies.

Fingers through short brown strands, soft like silk. My skin had so ached for that. I smiled at you, my own vision fractured. Nobody hurts you please darling let me make it better. You’re safe here with me in this nowhere no color place. And your eyes watched me outline your every feature. You were so still under my steady touch that I almost wanted to believe those fingers of mine had found a home.

I thought your lips should be warm, hot like the sun even…but they were cool; a soothing balm. I blushed to realize that mine were the fiery pair even as I reached for you, your face halved by the wavering shadow cast by metal in the desert.

My friend, my true love.

My lover in the flatlands.


	18. A throne of parts

Take them all away, I cannot think with all this noise. Someone blow them out like candles that, having served their purpose, only sting the eyes and make light things best left in darkness.

An outline of sin.

When there’s nothing left in my heart but waves of distraction, currents and eddies of pollutant choked air. Then I would have you draw me, were you still here, in mountains of dust. A queen on so soft a pile of those who used to be living... heaps of chemical dust blown by all my sighing into schools of the dead. Entire generations floating from room to room in this house full of emptiness.  
Would then I try to to stitch you all back together? Or even some fair few as to look on the madness heaped not only in corners as dust often is but central to the architecture of the very room in which I stand and sigh and say....nothing.

There is nothing to be said when all ears save mine are fractured into unhearing pieces, and those pieces piled abstract on other pieces perhaps once used for plucking strings or singing notes.

Nothing to say to no one, in my rooms of dust. My mansion of death...wherein I wait to be blown.


End file.
